~

Monthly Archives: December 2009

A few years ago, a former classmate of mine — Crush #1, in fact — had this to say about the eventual turn to forty. She called it the Forty F___-Its, because when you turn forty, “you should just say ‘Fuck it'” to the stuff that doesn’t matter. I know full well that she didn’t create this saying, but it sounded original coming from her. Of course, the more common saying is that forty is the new thirty. Tell that to former professional athletes who are in their forties! There is a qualitative difference, because even if our bodies are tuned up, our bones don’t lie.

But my one-time crush and now married mother of two is correct. By the time we reach our forties, we should realize that there are some things we should just say “F___ it” to. I have a list of what I need to say “F___ it” to now that I’m firmly on the other side of forty.

1. Hiding my intelligence. I’ve been a miserable failure at this anyway. Still, I can be incredibly conscientious of the words I use and how I speak in situations and settings in which my intellectual skills are shunned, including the workplace. No more of that! I learned long ago that people are fickle, and that those who have problems with the occasional fifty-cent word should use their mobile phones to look up Dictionary.com instead of laughing or pretending to understand what I’ve just said. I’m not talking about talking over people’s heads. I’m talking about being truer to myself.

2. Being ever more truthful about my life. For the most part I can’t complain about the directions I’ve gone in my life over the past twenty years. Between my educational journey, teaching, nonprofit management, dating, marriage and my son, things have been pretty good for a while. But the past two or three years have been tough on us financially, despite prayer and effort. My life is far from perfect, yet from the outside looking it, I guess it looks better than what I think it is. That’s fine for others. As for me, I can’t look at my life through others’ eyes. I don’t have that luxury. We have a bit less than twelve years to get things in order so that Noah can have real choices as a young man, from the college he wants to attend to a used hybrid car to drive. That means seeing where we are now and knowing where we need to go so that all of our futures are secure.

3. Career vs. calling. For most of my time in the workforce, especially in the years since finishing my doctoral thesis at the end of ’96, I’ve “been stuck in a moment,” so to speak (thanks U2!). I’ve been ambivalent about academia as a full-time profession, and over the years, have discovered myself as a writer. I’ve also worked for a decade with one crazed nonprofit entity after another, picking up plenty of management and program development skills along the way. In the past couple of years, I’ve attempted to reconcile my calling with my career and job aspirations. To little avail.

One thing I have decided is that my doctorate can hurt me as much as help me on the job front, and that it matters only somewhat if my job or next job fits with my authorship aspiration. What does all of this mean, anyway? Should I go back to school and earn a law degree, a degree much more flexible than a doctorate in history? Should I decide to teach high school history for a steadier income and the ability to reach students before they go to college unprepared for its rigors? These are questions in need of an answer, but in order to answer them, I have to say “F___ it” to all of my assumptions about my career up to this point.

4. Live my dream and not just dream. Okay, this sounds weird, because I thought that for most of the past two decades, I had been doing this, and doing it well. Not quite true. Between our finances, my career goals and Boy @ The Window, I feel sometimes as if I’ve gotten close, but not nearly close enough, to making my visions for my life real in my life. It’s clear to me now, though, what else needs to happen. I have to step up my efforts just one notch more, to recognize that I need to be bolder and more willing to network than I ever have before. At the very least, this will get me out of the house and classroom more often.

5. Move on. Sometimes I can be obsessed with a project or a person or an idea, sometimes all at once, as was the case with Crush #2 in ’87 and ’88. At times this has been the case with Boy @ The Window. I’m convinced that one of the reasons that it’s taken me two years to make significant revisions to the manuscript is because working on it has caused me to relive many of my memories and emotions from all those years ago. Not so in the past few months. I’ve been able to do substantial revisions, to imbue the manuscript with words and emotions that might not have come through in previous drafts. Now that folks are reading it and liking it, now that I’ve revised or rewritten every section of the book at least five times (and the first chapter at least eight times), it’s time to move on to other writing projects, even as I seek publication of Boy @ The Window. Let the chips fall where they may, although I think they’ll fall in the right order this time.

6. You can’t go home again. Nothing has borne this out better than in my work on Boy @ The Window and in my communications with former classmates and teachers on Facebook and through email correspondence. This isn’t a knock on them or on me. There were good reasons for why I didn’t become friends with them growing up, and going on twenty-three to thirty years on, I can see why through our expressions of thoughts and feelings now. But, Facebook and other correspondence have also reminded me about the good friends that I did and do have in my life in the years since Humanities and leaving Mount Vernon, including a couple from Mount Vernon. That good friends are hard for anyone to find, especially if you tend not to trust the people around you. And, at least in my case, why would I want to go home again anyway?

These are the ideas about where my life should go next as we enter a new decade. While the shape of things to come remains as uncertain as our world as a whole seems to be at the end of ’09, I’m certain of some things. That I’m creative enough, smart enough, successful enough and spiritual enough to get where I want to go, and that it won’t take until my son’s in college to get there. That the people I’ll meet — including the people I need to meet — will be ones who add something positive to my life, to the lives of my wife and child. And that there will be enough faith and wisdom, love and grace along the way. Happy New Year and decade, everyone!

It’s a shame to see what’s happened to Tiger Woods in the wonderful media over the past three weeks. At the rate things are going, I could claim to have had a tryst with the man the week of the ’01 US Open in Tulsa because I did a site visit for one of my previous jobs there. Of course, much of this is his own fault. Rampant infidelity. No Jordan-esque rules of sexual engagement, including a legally-binding contract. A certain lack of self-control in his personal life. And his refusal to face the public, not because we demand it, but ultimately, to protect his brand, his image. Yet none of those things are ones I want to discuss. I feel more compelled to discuss the race rules of interracial relationships and marriage in America.

As biracial — or Cablinasian — as Woods is, he is for all intends and purposes in this country, a Black man. Between the Choctaw and Irish blood (and who knows what else is in my genes), I can claim to be Cablin myself. Yet I know full well that I’m seen and see myself demographically speaking as Black or African American. Because of this, once one of us enters into an interracial relationship — especially with a White woman — smooth sailing is the only option we have in order to not be seen as pariahs. No financial problems, no hitting and certainly no cheating is allowed. There’s little to no margin for error, and any major ones will be met swiftly with retribution. By the White wife or girlfriend, their family, your White friends (and some Black ones, too), and if a public figure, the media and the blogosphere as well.

What makes Tiger’s transgressions worse for him are two additional components. One, his wife Elin is a blond, and not just White. Two, unlike many of the White women Black men tend to date or marry, she is perceived as attractive by many folks, if not most. The combination in our zero-sum race rules around Black men with White women means that someone like Tiger Woods can’t act like anything other than the perfect husband. I’m not condoning his cheating one iota. All I know is that we were less hard on John Edwards, a guy whom was only running for President of the United States, and could’ve brought the Democratic Party down with him if he had made it to the nomination stage. We’re harder on Tiger, not just he projected a solid image, not because he let the media and the public down, but because he’s a Black guy cheating on an allegedly beautiful and blond White woman.

If you think that this is all poppycock and balderdash, anyone remember O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown between ’92 and ’97? Those were the years that it was painfully obvious that White guys I knew were ready to form a mob, march over to Santa Monica, and kill the Hall-of-Fame running back for first hitting Brown before their divorce in ’92, then killing Brown in ’94. The last three weeks have been about the same issues. The media just refuses to see it that way. Sure, there’s shock and outrage about what Tiger’s done, and Tiger should go public to protect himself. But this is about race, and not in way Rush Limbaugh would yell about it either.

It’s funny. There’s no outrage about the fact that Tiger’s wife smashed in the back window of his Cadillac SUV with a golf club. That he was obviously attempting to get away from her. That he was treated for more injuries than running into a fire hydrant would account for. Yet, I guess, it’s okay for a blond White woman who’s been cheated on by a Black man to flip out and commit an act of domestic violence. If the tables were turned, billionaire or not, best golfer on the planet or not, Tiger would’ve gone to jail, and might still be in jail.

I’m not exactly speaking from my own experience in dating White women, because I haven’t. Not because I didn’t have the opportunity to do so. Mostly because as enlightened as I am, I’m also a bit old school on the issue of interracial dating and marriage. That it should be more about who I am than what I look like, what I stand for and not just how much money I have in my bank account this morning, love and not just lust. But my own experiences, going back to the end of high school, have shown otherwise. Getting accused of sexual harassment after a White female co-worker had made several advances toward me was a learning experience. One of many in which my interests were primarily platonic and theirs sexual in nature. One of at least half a dozen where once my intentions were clear, I faced harassment and berating, as if I was supposed to be attracted to a White woman because they’re White.

I could be crude and say that butt shape, or the lack thereof, is the reason why I never sought to date anyone White. I could be a bit more honest and say that the prospect of having to deal with their baggage while having to constantly explain my own would be another reason. Let’s face it. There aren’t a lot of folks who do get me, but most of them are of color. The full truth is, though, that in the area of relationships, I haven’t trusted the words and deeds of White women. Not friendships, just relationships. Now, maybe that’s prejudice on some scale, or maybe that’s preference. It may even be a bit of both. Still, given responses I’ve seen to folks with way more going for them than me, like O.J. and Tiger, can you really blame me?

At the same time, though, I don’t believe — like a lot of other Black folk — that Tiger would’ve been okay had he married a sista. Infidelity is serious and marriage-destroying, after all. He likely would’ve been better off not getting married at all. If you couldn’t keep it in your pants before marriage, then it is highly unlikely that you could after getting married. Marriage is hard work, no matter how beautiful and attractive you think your spouse is. Perhaps the biggest lesson here is that Woods didn’t have the capacity to work more on his marriage than his golf game.

But for me, part of the lesson here is related to race. Maybe it’s important in a multicultural society for all of us to date outside of our primary demographic group before settling on a mate. Just not to the exclusion of folks that are most physically similar to us. Maybe it’s not. It’s not like there’s a rulebook for this. It just seems that there’s way too much emphasis on Tiger’s cheating and not enough on the class, gender and racial dynamics of his marriage. Not to mention the fact that we can’t possibly know what that marriage has been like from the outside looking in. My issue here really is about how we as a public get to sit and judge someone else’s mess when most of us are wallowing neck-deep in our own crap. It’s ludicrous and a shame — on us.

The other day, a student of mine made a reference that very much reminded me of, well, me, the person I was twenty-two years ago. It was as part of a conversation about looking for work. She didn’t want to be another starving artist, living in some basement apartment somewhere, “smearing paint on a canvas” while waiting for a big break. I thought that the idea of a starving artist had all but died out in the era of bling-bling.

But it made me think for a while about the choices I’ve made with my life and career in the years since the middle of my senior year at Mount Vernon High School. As I talked about in a posting a few weeks ago, I once said to my AP English teacher Rosemary Martino that I didn’t want to be a starving artist “like Edgar Allen Poe” all those years ago. Now a student had made a similar — although better developed — reference. I think I understand better the momentary look of shock on my teacher’s face now.

It made me wonder if the quality of my life and career would be better these days if I had embraced the promise Martino saw in my writing back then. I mean, I was already a slightly malnourished six-foot-one and 160-pounder at that point anyway. The inner struggle to put thoughts to paper creatively would’ve been much easier at seventeen than it is as a forty-year-old.

Maybe so. But until Noah or one of his progeny design a time machine, I can’t rewrite my history in order to make me embrace what I now see as my calling. All I know is that those words I uttered in March ’87 have stayed with me for nearly twenty-three years. The question of finding and following my calling has always been juxtaposed with my need to eat and pay the rent and other bills. How do I do both without dropping one of the balls that I’m juggling?

The issue for more than half of my adult life was finding my calling. Along the way, I spent the summer of ’88 unemployed, the first week of my sophomore year at Pitt homeless and three weeks in May ’91 losing sixteen pounds for lack of food. Not to mention six weeks of unemployment in ’93, walking to Carnegie Mellon many a time in the snow with holes in my sneakers in ’94, and two and a half years of underemployment from December ’96 to June ’99. I was a starving writer long before I saw myself foremost as one. When one doesn’t follow their calling and doesn’t follow a typical path to making a buck, the tendency is insufficient funds.

The point is, we as Americans in a post-modern, post-industrial world have to get paid and pursue our dreams in order to succeed and survive. For educated folk like myself, “we have to get a little bit crazy,” as Seal would say. If it takes a pay cut or less job responsibility to find the time to write, then maybe that’s what it takes. Or maybe it’s a bunch of all-nighters (non-consecutive, of course) with your manuscript, only to drag yourself into work for a full shift the next morning. Or maybe it’s risking your spouse, your comfortably uncomfortable way of life, your financial present, for a more fulfilling and profitable future. Maybe it’s all of these things, maybe it’s none of them. There isn’t a single formula or one simple path to both, not as an artist and certainly not one as a writer.

Creative abilities, even genius, may well drive people mad, but most folks in pursuit of their calling aren’t fools. No one, including the starving artist, wants to starve. Some of us, though, have a desire for much more than the ability to get a job, any job, and hold one long enough to see our own kids graduate from college and meet someone they truly love. Even with the responsibilities of adulthood, we shouldn’t give up on our own aspirations, for it’s those things that we reach for (although not at all costs) that will help others — including the most important folks — in our lives pursue their own calling.

Like the song “The Thrill Is Gone,” popularized by B.B. King in the month and year that I was born, the jobs that so many of our leaders alleged that they are holding onto for Americans are gone. Going, going, gone! Like a steroids-driven Barry Bonds home run into San Francisco Bay, the jobs that Americans have expected to be their birthright for the past six or seven decades no longer exist. For any American with less than a bachelor’s degree to expect to get a job paying more than $30,000 a year with limited job experience is foolhardy. For any undereducated American to expect a manufacturing job that pays enough to support a family of four (about $50,000) with a full slate of benefits needs to be committed!

About two weeks ago, I attended a studio taping of the AlJazeera program Faultlines with the topic of “The Color of Recession.” The premise — that the Obama Administration wasn’t doing enough to help Americans of color recover from the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. While that could be true, the panelists, especially talking heads like the Rev. Jesse “Keep-Hope-Alive” Jackson and Linda Chavez argued about the failures of the Bush 43 Administration to avert the crisis. It was a zoo, and the host of the show might as well been a tamer whose head was already in the lion’s mouth.

Besides ridiculous arguments about the overthrowing of capitalism by folks like ’08 Green Party Vice-Presidential candidate Rosa Clemente and counterarguments by Chavez about socialists not being patriotic, one thing clearly stood out. Jackson, Chavez, and even Clemente agreed on one thing. That jobs in the industrial sector ought to be saved for Americans, and that the Obama Administration could somehow play a role in saving them. That simple fact proved the one thing I’ve known about American politics since high school. That the distance between most Americans on the ideological scale is about the same as the distance from my right thumb to my right index finger.

But it also shows how significant the leadership deficit is in our great nation when folks who should know better spout rhetoric that hasn’t been true in places like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Indianapolis since ’84, and in places like Buffalo, Rochester, Camden, and Newark since the mid-60s. This is a post-industrial economy, one that is dependent on the Information Age. While there will always be some manufacturing jobs in the US — we still have a military-industrial complex, after all, not to mention Southern right-to-work states — the days of factories with a workforce of 50,000 and 100,000 people has long passed. Unless we can turn the clock back to about 1890, we will never again see the days of steel mills and auto plants that single-handedly provided work for an entire city or region.

With more than eighty percent of all new living-wage jobs produced in this country requiring the equivalent of an associate’s degree or some postsecondary credential, it’s time we stop lying to the public about how any government can protect certain kinds of jobs for their citizens. We need more nurses, teachers, radiologists, engineers and chemists, not more young folk who can’t even find their home state on a map. And that’s with the name of the state on the map! Bill Gates may well be right in saying that high schools as we know them today are obsolete. But that’s only true because our mentality about the kinds of jobs we can get after high school hasn’t changed with our ever-changing economy.

It’s a shame that our leadership can’t be more honest about where we are these days on the job front. Our official unemployment rate is 10.2 percent, meaning that in reality, it’s closer to 20 percent. Meaning that times are hard even for folks with at least a bachelor’s degree as an educational credential. But the vast majority of our educational haves will recover from this downturn, find work — mostly good paying work — and put their lives back together. Those whose lives were once or ever dependent on the manufacturing world are already a part of the have-nots.

I don’t care how many articles discuss the fact that there are people in this country who are making good money — and are even rich — and don’t possess a postsecondary degree or certificate of any sort. That group is a small and shrinking one. These days, your odds are better with Powerball or Mega Millions than they are venturing into the job market for a non-service industry (read “Rite-Aid,” “CVS” or “Walmart” here) job without a degree.

Bottom line: the sooner we as a people accept that the jobs of the past are gone, never to return, the sooner that we can get on to another central issues to jobs in education. We need to put pressure on our federal and state officials, nonprofit entities, and religious organizations to stop acting as if a high school education is the limit for most of America. We need to assume that most of us have the ability — if not the training — necessary to obtain some sort of postsecondary credential. We need to make our 15,000 school districts into ones that prepare our children for a twenty-first century, post-industrial economy. Without this pressure, we will expand our permanent underclass by the tens of millions in the next decade or two, weighing down our economy in the process. That America isn’t the one I want to get older in, nor is it one I want my son growing up in.

December, my favorite month of the year. Usually. For most of my forty years, it has represented a time of sighing relief that another year was about to pass, another twelve months of imperfection gone, a chance to reconfigure and gain momentum to have a better next year. But Decembers at the end of decades have been of even more significance for me, because they represent the precipice of the start of a new decade not only on the calendar, but for my own life. Turning ten, twenty and thirty gave me more food for thought than I would normally have in a typical twelfth month. Now it’s happening again, as I officially turn forty (most of this year, I’ve forgotten that I’m still technically thirty-nine).

Ten years ago, I realized that I hadn’t planned to live past thirty when I was a teenager. I saw my life as such a tragic and fragile one when I was fourteen that the idea that marriage and parenting would be anywhere in my future would’ve been about the only thing to make me laugh out loud back then. My aim in life from about twelve and a half and twenty was to finish college, and from twenty to twenty-six was to go to grad school, finish those degrees, and publish my first book. Cars, houses, specific career aspirations, a wife and a son, none of those were in my plans. Heck, I didn’t even know who my true friends were until a December contemplation session in December ’89, much less love and marriage.

The sad truth is, I’ve achieved just about everything I intended to achieve ten and twenty Decembers ago. That’s good, but it also shows how limited the first visions for myself were. Being an assistant director of a social justice fellowship program and publishing a book on multiculturalism shouldn’t have been the only things that I hoped to achieve in the first seven years after finishing my doctorate. Getting married in ’00 was a major achievement, considering how many folks I grew up with thought of me as “asexual.” But staying married and making the marriage work is the real achievement and the real work, something I’ve learned this decade. Having Noah around is both a labor of love and really hard work, but actually not as hard as watching after my four younger siblings would’ve been twenty Decembers ago.

Even putting the finishing touches on Boy @ The Window, finding an agent and publisher, and then getting it published, as great an achievement as that will be, is a limited one in the end. Even in the worst case, the manuscript’s published before I hit my mid-forties. Even if the book hits the bestseller list, what do I do after that? Write more books about the imperial narcissism of everyday Americans, about the need for universal postsecondary education, about the lives of other, not-so-famous people? I know I’ll keep on writing, but that’s about all I know for sure.

So what will my life look like as I prepare for decade number five? Where do I want to be by December ’19? For starters, steadier and better paying employment would be a goal. Making sure that Noah’s education and quality of life stays on track so that he can get — but doesn’t necessarily need — an academic or athletic scholarship for college. Supporting Angelia as she finishes her master’s degree in interactive journalism, and in moving from there into a career of her own choosing and making. Freeing ourselves once and for all from debt. Those are goals, most or all of which should be met long before I can no longer jump high enough to dunk a basketball.

But what I really want in the end is a sense of happiness and peace that I’ve experienced only on rare occasions in my life to date. Some of that will come as some of the near-future goals get met. Still, I know even with a great job, an enviable savings account, a great kid and a wonderful wife that happiness and peace are forces that come from within. No amount of money, financial stability or independence can give me or anyone else real happiness and a sense that, no matter whatever else is going on, I’ll be fine. Some would say, only God can give us that.

I would say in response that this isn’t completely accurate, because we have to be willing to be happy, to be at peace, to be successful at not creating drama for ourselves and others. Or we could do what Bruce Springsteen says in his introspective “Tunnel of Love.” We’ve “got to learn to live with what [we] can’t rise above,” not only in marriage, but in all of our lives, for we aren’t perfect, and not every imperfection has a permanent cure. Maybe this is the thing I need to remember as I go through this end-of-the-decade December.

There's also a Kindle edition on Amazon.com. The enhanced edition can be read only with Kindle Fire, an iPad or a full-color tablet. The links to the enhanced edition through Apple's iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble NOOK edition are below. The link to the Amazon Kindle version is also immediately below: